Rev. Nancy Jay Crumbine, guest preacher this week, writes: “Human beings are unique among other animals not only in the complexity of our speech, but in our profound ability to be distracted. As technology has pulled us further and further away from other animals and from our animal selves, distraction appears to be everywhere, a cultural disease. I would like to explore how wilderness and the wildness inside us can help us move toward better concentration and better awareness, toward being as awake and alive as our animal cousins.”
Rev. Crumbine is a Unitarian Universalist minister, writer, actor, public speaker, and professor at Dartmouth College. She lectures widely under the auspices of the Vermont and New Hampshire Humanities Councils and at various UU conferences both in the US and the UK. She is the author of Humility, Anger, and Grace: Meditations Towards a Life that Matters and The Unitarian Paradox. Her articles and poems appear in a number of anthologies, most recently in two volumes of The Still Puddle Poets. Nancy was one of the organizers and keynote speakers, along with the Rev. Anne Bancroft, for the International Elizabeth Tarbox Religious Education Week held in England in April 2008, which brought together religious educators from the United States and the United Kingdom.